A safe and well-paid shelter for the useless and unqualified. A safe and well-paid shelter for useless people without credentials. All political parties assume that, if they win elections, they will place their best people in positions of public responsibility. Then comes the dull reality of political bargaining, which quickly takes precedence over the public […]
Ode to Selective Virtue Read Post »
Uruguay in the geopolitics of communist revolutionary exportation. A web woven from Havana to Prague that ensnared an unprotected democracy. OPERATION MANUEL It is widely believed that deep differences existed between the Soviets and the Cubans, particularly because the Soviet Union was supposedly opposed to exporting revolution across Latin America in the manner promoted by
Cuba’s Revolution, Uruguay, the Soviets, and Czechoslovak Intelligence Read Post »
On the awakening of the sleepers and history’s judgment on collective madness It came to pass, reader, that after decades of staging this bloody farce and delirium for more than sixty years, the curtain began to fray from sheer exhaustion. The nations of the South, once the stage for “Operation Manuel” and the oil courtship
The Caribbean Theater of Marvels – Final chapter Read Post »
Of the Scribes of the Shadow and the Stripping of the Idols of Clay It came to pass, reader, that while the peoples of the South danced to the flute of the Bearded Knight, other men, more discreet and far less eloquent, devoted themselves to the monastic task of writing everything down. They were the
THE CARIBBEAN CABINET OF WONDERS – Chapter V Read Post »
From the Colombian writer García Márquez and other authors such as Rulfo, one tends to associate magical realism with a certain tropical region. Places where rain and sunlight alternate so profusely that they produce exuberant, and sometimes overstated, vegetation and human behavior. Strictly speaking, this 20th-century literary movement is not exclusive to the tropics. Still,
HUGO CHÁVEZ: A CASE OF 20TH-CENTURY MAGICAL REALISM APPLIED TO 21ST-CENTURY SOCIALISM Read Post »
And all of us, pawed over in the same mud Allow me, readers, a brief digression born of emotional discharge, before returning to Cuba.I am compelled by the detritus expelled from the mental sphincters of absurd and corrupt leaderships, escorting the funeral procession of Western economies in both hemispheres.Fidel’s Marxism proved to have an unexpected
The Revived Skeletons of Pretended Viceroys Read Post »
Of the Wells of Deceit and the Heir of Incendiary Rhetoric After years of sowing gunpowder winds, the island of the Bearded Knight finally discovered that utopias, though beautiful on paper, have the unfortunate habit of not providing food. Once fertile and cultivated, the nation had become a wasteland of ration cards, where freedom and
THE CARIBBEAN CABINET OF WONDERS – Chapter IV Read Post »
Of Cardboard Martyrs and the Infiltration of the Machine-Gun Gallant It came to pass, reader, that once the seed of discord had been sown, it had to be watered with something thicker than ink. It required the mystique of gunpowder. For it is well known that enthusiasm is a disease young militants contract through lack
THE CARIBBEAN MARVELS FARCE Read Post »
Several events that have recently impacted public opinion in Uruguay share a common thread that is not always addressed with sufficient clarity. The passport issue, the construction of two naval vessels for the Uruguayan Navy in a Spanish shipyard, and the recent restrictions on migrant visas to the United States are different episodes, yet all
International Relations: The Risks of Improvisation Read Post »
An experience that does not seem to be sufficiently valued, particularly in the Americas. The Uruguayan case. Now it is the turn of another of its former victims: Poland. The Polish Constitution of 1997 establishes in Article 13: “Political parties and other organizations whose programs are based on totalitarian methods and modes of activity characteristic